Skip to main content

Amazon Echo Dot Review: A Smart Alarm Clock

I have been a tech enthusiast for as long as I can remember. I love fiddling with the latest and greatest. So when the Amazon Echo line-up launched in India, I had to get my hands on one. I went for the smaller Echo Dot as I was not convinced of its usefulness. As It turned out, I was right. Another reason for buying the smallest of the bunch had to do with the sound quality. Time and time again reviewer kept saying that the Echo speakers sound average. So there wasn't any reason pay extra for a bigger speaker. I bought the Echo Dot for discounted price of ₹3,149.00. It came with 1 year Prime membership.
Amazon Echo Dot
Amazon Echo Dot
The setup process was a big hassle. You need to install the Alexa app to set up your Echo device. The app is as bad as any other app from Amazon. It just wouldn't detect my Echo Dot. It took me about an hour to finish the setup. Once the setup was done, I started off with simple question like, how's the weather? What's the time? Alexa answered them without breaking a sweat. But when it came to continued conversations, Alexa just fell apart. It couldn't keep up the context. And the fact that one has to keep saying "Alexa" every time, made the conversation feel unnatural. Hopefully things will get better with software updates.

Alexa's smart home capabilities excited me the most. But there aren't many Alexa-enabled devices available in the market. There are a couple of bulbs, universal remote controllers and plugs. That's about it. I bought a 7W Syska LED bulb. I had high hopes. But my experience was mixed. It was difficult to set up as well. The Syska app had a hard time detecting my bulb. Quirky setup seems to be a theme here. Once connected, the smart light can be controlled from the Syska app, or the Alexa app or using Alexa voice commands. You can ask Alexa to turn it on or off, change the brightness or set a different color. There's a list of colors to choose from. However custom colors can only be set from the Syska app. The Syska app also allows you to schedule automatic turn on and turn off times.

Screenshot of the Alexa mobile app
Bulb Control View (Alexa App)
One has to give credit to Amazon. The underlying infrastructure is pretty solid. The latency of smart home devices is very low. The bulb react almost instantly. But not everything is rainbows and unicorns. The bub isn't as bright as I would have liked. And suppose you ask Alexa to turn off the bulb. Now if the electricity goes out and comes back after a few minutes, the bulb will turn on automatically. It doesn't revert to the last state. This is such an inconvenience. You wouldn't want your bulb to turn on in the middle of the night, or when you're out. The way to prevent this is to turn off the switch; which defeats the purpose of a smart bulb somewhat.

Integration with Other Services
Amazon makes a big deal out of its far-field voice recognition technology. Echo Dot's seven microphones are supposed to work from across the room, even in noisy environments. But I'm here to tell you that they are not good at all. Even in quiet environments, Alexa's voice recognition is not that great. It fails 3/4 out of 10 times. And the moment it gets noisy, the microphones just fall apart. You ask it to play a song and it plays something else. You ask it to set reminders and it gives you facts from Wikipedia. It could be because of my India accent; who knows. But the Google Assistant understands my commands just fine.

Incase you needed proof
There are little things that add up to be quite annoying. For example,
  • If you ask Alexa to calculate (10000 / 2) * (5000 / 2) + 1, while answering it will repeat the expression then tell you the answer. Not helpful when you're looking for a quick answer
  • Let's say you were listening to a song and you tell it to "repeat the last song", Alexa will start playing "Hindi chartbusters from Saavn"
  • I have an alarm set for 09:00 every weekday. When I say "cancel today's alarm", it turns off the alarm all together; not just for today.
On top of these quirks, the Alexa companion app is not that good. It feels sluggish. It's always loading one thing or other. It feels like a web app in a native shell.

On the bright side, Alexa can do some pretty neat things. Like,
  • It can read out your Kindle books. But the pronunciations are robotic. And there's no way to change the reading speed. I feel that this should have been a feature of the Kindle app not of Alexa.
  • It can play songs from Saavn or Prime Music. It can also play radio stations from TuneIn.
  • It can add items to your shopping list which syncs with the Amazon app.
  • It can set reminder, alarms and timers.
  • There are also gimmicks like Alexa calling which I'm skeptical about. As it stands right now, I see no reason why anyone would choose Alexa calling over a phone call. There are creepy features like Drop-In, which lets contacts to connect to your device without a request. Fortunately you can turn it off!
  • One of the more interesting features are routines, which performs multiple actions when you say a phrase. For example, you can say "good night" so that your lights turn off and Alexa wishes you good night.
  • The smart home features let you control Alexa compatible bulbs, smart plugs, universal remotes, Fire TV Stick etc. The choices aren't that many. And honestly, these smart devices are somewhat expensive. You can also create groups to control multiple devices at once.
  • It can inform you about the weather, tell facts, play games, tell you which movies are playing near you etc.
You can expand Alexa's capabilities by enabling skills created by 3rd party developers. Some skills worth considering are Saavn, TED Talks, Uber, Ola and Zomato. You can do even more by linking other services via IFTTT. Out of curiosity, I also published a Alexa Skill. You can check it out here.

Now that the honeymoon period is over, I don't use the Echo Dot that often. Sure, it can help you with information, reminders, timers and whole 9 yards. But I can do all of that on my phone. And I can do them more easily and quickly. I can't help but wonder how bad the voice recognition is. I don't trust Alexa with critical things like reminders and alarms. There is no way to lock Alexa down so that it responds to my voice only. Anyone can come and mess up my alarms, reminders, lists and so on. I haven't tested the Google Home. But I don't think there's much value in a home assistant/smart speaker at present. My experience may have been different if I had a Fire TV Stick or a multi-room audio setup, or more devices and services that connected to Alexa. But for now, it's just an alarm clock with a voice.

Comments

Popular Posts

Why I Started Blogging

It's been almost 5 years since I started blogging. This is the 30th post being published. That means over the course of 5 years, I've written 6 posts per year. Although 30 is much less than I would have liked, this is one of those pet projects I have continued even after the honeymoon phase. Today I want take some time and discuss why I started this blog in the first place. I was in my 3rd year of engineering studies when I started out. I had already developed a keen interest towards programming and tech in general by then. Having a blog seemed liked a cool idea. There were couple of more reasons to go ahead with this idea. That's what we are here to discuss today. Setting up a blog seemed like a technically challenging task. I wanted to know how to setup a blog with comments, advertisements and with a custom domain. It sounded like a great way to acquire new skills and learn new things along the way. Back then I didn't know anyone who shared my enthusiasm for tech

Dear edX!

Dear edX, I was in my 2nd year of college when you came to life. And I was ecstatic! No, not to be in college (LOL) but to have finally found my calling. Computer programming. I was browsing through all the resources I could find. Codecademy courses mainly. And right at that moment, you arrived. Your parents hail from the Harvard University and from the MIT. So of course you received my attention. Also, you had an unique selling point: free certificates. This was huge! No one else was doing it. It seemed you were actually trying to help students learn new skills and show off to the world. I was stoked to enroll into the course developed world's top professors. The free certificates were a big motivator to complete the courses. The first course I enrolled into was developed by The Linux Foundation. I have taken several courses since then. Some were on computer programming, some were about a country's history and some provided advice on career growth and personal finance. 2

The State of Video Streaming Services in India [Part 2: The Aftermath]

It's been a year since I published my post about the state of video streaming services in India (which can be found  here ). I wrote how media companies were trying to get a piece of that market. A lot has changed in a year. For starters, Hotstar has received a revamp and it works on my Kubuntu system now. Prime Video remains the best option for most people. Many more services have launched. Ozee has rebranded itself as Zee5. But a few things have stood the test of time. Netflix's pricing is as expensive as it was a year ago. Yes, that was sarcastic. Now there are lot of streaming services to choose from. Here's a list of some of the popular ones. Amazon Prime Video Hotstar Netflix YouTube Zee5 Eros Now Spuul Voot Hoichoi ALTBalaji Hooq JioCinema / JioTV Sony LIV YuppTV BIGFlix The list goes on and on. It is said that competition is good for the consumer. More the competition, more the aggressive pricing, more the benefit for the consumer. Just lo

Notifications, Not Ads

Notifications on our smartphones are pretty common these days. Notifications are designed to provide the user with helpful information and alerts. For example, a reminder notification, an email notification, a download-in-progress notification. According to Google, Notifications provide short, timely, and relevant information about your app when it’s not in use. Source: Material Design | Notifications It's a useful feature offered by modern mobile operating systems. An average smartphone user gets many, many notifications each day. Some of 'em are useful, some of 'em are less so. Many are intruding in nature. The issue is that developers have started to abuse the notification framework. They are using notifications to serve ads and promotions which gets pretty annoying pretty quickly. These notifications are neither timely nor helpful. And almost none of apps allow you to opt out from this crap. The only thing you can do is block all notificat

How to Automate NPS Contributions - A Step by Step Guide with Screenshots

Introduction The National Pension System is a great financial product for creating your retirement kitty. With contribution of just ₹5000 per month, you can accumulate more than a crore! I am a NPS subscriber (through NSDL eNPS) myself. If you have read my previous post  regarding EPF you know I like NPS for the following reasons. 60 year lock-in period Additional tax exemption under section 80CCD (1B) Choice of various assets classes Choice of pension fund managers Option to change your asset allocation or pension fund manager Low cost of fund management Transparency & organization structure Good customer support Online account opening and management Multiple exit options at retirement Screenshot from  Pension Calculator | NPS Trust Some Not So Great Things NPS is far from